Reinette Simirenko Apple (Spring 2027)

This is our first year growing Reinette Simirenko, so everything below is secondhand until we get more long-term data from our own mother trees.

Overview

Reinette Simirenko is a green apple from Ukraine, sometimes sold as Renet Simirenko or Wood's Greening. By the early 1900s it was being grown across much of Ukraine and into Crimea.

Origin and History

The story goes back to the garden of Platon Fyodorovich Simirenko, a Ukrainian sugar merchant and gardener, in the late 1800s. The sources don't agree on how it got there. The UK's National Fruit Collection says it was found in Simirenko's garden and described in 1895. A 1906 Russian fruit atlas (Atlas plodov) says Simirenko brought it in from Belgium. Either way, the atlas says it got more and more attention from growers after 1887 and was being grown in the Kiev, Poltava, Kharkov, Kherson, Podolsk and Chernigov provinces and in Crimea.

Fruit and Uses

Medium sized and green, with tender, crisp, greenish-white flesh and a subacid (lightly tart) flavor, according to the National Fruit Collection. It's picked in mid-October in England. It's a fresh-eating apple first. We haven't found good published data on how long it keeps, so we'll report back once we've stored our own.

Growth Habit and Spacing

Ours are on Bud 118 semi-dwarf rootstock. Plan on about 15 feet between trees, up to 18 feet for airflow.

Pollination

It needs a pollenizer. It blooms mid to mid-late, so pair it with something like Honeycrisp, Northern Spy, Black Oxford, Wealthy, Prairie Spy or Oriole.

Cold Hardiness

We've listed it at zone 3b for now, but we want to be upfront that we haven't found a documented survival temperature for it. It was widely grown in Ukraine a century ago, but that doesn't give us a number. Treat it as untested in a cold climate until we've wintered our own trees.

Photo credit: “Cross section of Reinette Simirenko” by the National Fruit Collection, Brogdale, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0.

Photos: “Яблуко Ренет Симиренка IMG 0484 02” by Nickispeaki, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; “Яблуко Ренет Симиренка IMG 0484 04” by Nickispeaki, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.